9 ms·

John Carmack is a good role model for any techies that move up to management. If you want to keep in touch with the base tech that your devs are using, you have

• Kenji 11y ago
  The problem is that most techies who move up to management don't have Carmack's brain. This guy is a machine! For a normal person, it is almost impossible to get a workload done that's comparable to Carmack's.
  • tluyben2 11y ago
    Especially combined with management tasks; I find coding and management hard to combine. At least in my brain they feel very different and as a CTO I feel I must do both. I do not want to end up like a CTO that is out of touch or has his current tech knowledge from buzz words in management magazines like so many tech management people I know who are my age.
    • fr0styMatt2 11y ago
      I wonder if part of it is that some techies who aspire to management do so because they don't actually like developing software. As an individual contributor I can't imagine giving up my day-to-day coding for a management position. Management responsibilities, sure. I'd wager that most software developers who are given enough autonomy are doing a lot of micro-project management anyway. Giving up on researching new technology and playing around with stuff? Not a chance.
      • SmellyGeekBoy 11y ago
        I'm in this boat at the moment (one man band contractor of many years finally starting to take on employees). I'm finding that as I delegate more of the routine day-to-day work away, I'm actually finding myself with more time to play around with new stuff. Trouble is, in my line of work (corporate .NET stuff) customers aren't interested in anything new and exciting - they just want Windows applications and ASP.NET forms connected to SQL Server databases. Of course, if you're lucky enough to be in a job (I'm thinking frontend web) where playing with exciting new tech is part of the job, I can absolutely see how the move to management and the loss of overall hands-on time with the code can be a bad thing. Thankfully for me it's been somewhat liberating.
    • studentrob 11y ago
      I can imagine. I think you can do both by focusing on one for awhile and then moving back to the other role. In the short term it is a set back but long term you can develop both skills. Meanwhile you can share management responsibilities with others and find out who makes the team gel the most and who are the great coders. Eventually if you can retain all this trained talent I believe you'll have a really strong team. Of course this happens naturally as people are promoted and moved around but I think if we could admit to ourselves that a manager once does not need to be a manager always, we'd all be so much better off.
      • tluyben2 11y ago
        In the Netherlands, where I am from, at least (I think it is less so in the US?), you are a complete failure/loser if you are a coder > 35 y/o (I am 40). You are supposed to be a manager then. My path was different than that but I cannot help thinking this attitude which is pushed in university and by (a lot of) parents influenced some decisions I made. Coders over 45 are considered sad and when you meet them in companies they are usually in the basement and treated like idiots. We were hired to give this mobile app development course to a large company in the Netherlands; it turned out this was just to fill out the training responsibilities the company had with their employees. All of the trainees were over 45, most over 50 and the company didn't care what we did and they would never use it there but apparently their employees expressed interest to learn about app development. Sad.
        • studentrob 11y ago
          Yikes that is sad. Hopefully things like open source and github will allow aging developers to show their value. If a business sidelines an employee based on their age then that's the company's loss right? And hopefully the employee can find a smarter employer.
        • mdpopescu 11y ago
          43 year old developer here, haven't seen this happen in Ireland.
    • dasil003 11y ago
      I struggle with this every day. The amount of juggling priorities and helping a dozen different people that a technical manager has to do is completely at odds with the focus required to write non-trivial code.
• deleted 11y ago
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• jlas 11y ago
  I wonder what Carmack's managerial responsibilities are like. I imagine if he's developing/designing for most of the week, how much time does he really devote to being a CTO/manager?
  • froo 11y ago
    I imagine his managerial style is leading by example. More of a "Hey guys, we're going in this direction, follow me!" over a "Hey, we're going this way, off you go!"
• toomuchtodo 11y ago
  I would be interested in examples of people (besides Carmack) who are able to handle day to day management responsibilities and stay technically sharp in new technologies coming out. There's only so much time in a week, and your performance drops as you exceed 40-50 hrs/week. I'd rather hire someone with management skill who knows how to delegate to those who have the required technical skills, rather than spin constantly trying to be the master of everything and failing at it.
  • noblethrasher 11y ago
    Technology has a lot of churn, but arguably we haven't seen much that is actually new since 1980: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/432922/significant-new-inventions-in-computing-since-1980 http://stackoverflow.com/questions/432922/significant-new-in...
• Pyxl101 11y ago
  Why do you say that Carmack is in management? I don't get the impression that he's a people manager. A CTO does not necessarily have people reporting to them in a people management sense. From what I've read, I would assume he does not. (I could be wrong - I don't really know.) High judgment individual contributors often take on responsibilities that can be considered management, like deciding business and technical strategy, designing products, prioritizing roadmaps, etc., but while these are management functions, taking on these responsibilities does not mean that one is in management. From the blog post, it sounds like Carmack is a highly productive, high judgment individual contributor with the responsibilities you'd expect of a CTO (technical strategy). I would say that someone is "in management" when their chief function is managing other people. From this post, Carmack seems to be delivering work as an individual contributor and (very senior) technical lead. Along the same lines, I recommend we discourage phrasing like "move up to management". Management is a different job, not a better or superior one. In well-run technical companies there are managers and individual contributors at all seniority levels, such that one does not need to become a manager to "move up", even to CTO level.
  • ramidarigaz 11y ago
    In some of his recent keynotes (especially the later quakecon ones) he focuses a lot on how he's changed his mind and that he now believes that software development has a lot of "social science" aspects to it. I think he's given a lot of consideration to how one manages a software team, and even though he sometimes disappears into his office to write something like this Netflix app, he still does manage people.
    • blazespin 11y ago
      In theory a CTO should only have employees that self manage.
  • blazespin 11y ago
    Very well said, wish everyone could read this comment.
  • bucky 11y ago